Conspiracy theories and misinformation in digital media: An international expert assessment of challenges, trends, and interventions

Summary

This paper presents a three-wave Delphi study (May–September 2022) involving 47 international scholars and practitioners across 13 countries, designed as an anticipatory, multi-level impact assessment of conspiracy theories and misinformation in digital media. The authors argue that the existing literature is fragmented, individualistic, and presentist, and use the Delphi format to produce an integrative ten-area taxonomy connecting current challenges, expected five-to-ten-year trends, and prioritized interventions. The core claim is that there is “no silver bullet”: mitigating information disorder requires coordinated action across platforms, journalism, science, politics, and civil society, with structural interventions (platform governance, news ecosystems) rated more important than individual-level fixes like literacy or fact-checking.

Key Contributions

• One of the first integrative, anticipatory, multi-stakeholder impact assessments of conspiracy theories and misinformation crossing disciplinary and Global North/South boundaries.
• A ten-area thematic taxonomy mapping challenges → trends → interventions at macro, meso, and micro levels.
• Surfacing of underexplored issues: circumvention of moderation via subcultural language, “Uberization” of journalism, demand-side dynamics for deceptive content, and a shift from misinformed citizens to cynical nihilists.
• Methodological demonstration of combining Classic and Group Delphi designs for fast-moving information-environment research.
• DACH-region-specific policy recommendations from the Wave 3 workshop.

Methods

A three-wave Delphi conducted in 2022. Wave 1 (n=47; 38 scholars, 9 practitioners) used anonymous open-ended online surveys to elicit challenges, trends, and interventions. Wave 2 (n=26) used 4-point Likert ratings to prioritize items. Wave 3 was a two-day Group Delphi workshop (n=9) with rotating focus groups, oriented toward the DACH region. Recruitment combined purposive snowball and maximum-variation sampling across 13 countries and multiple disciplines (communication, history, philosophy, political science, psychology) plus practitioner roles (journalists, fact-checkers, activists, educators). Qualitative coding was iterative-inductive in MAXQDA; quantitative analysis in R.

Findings

• Experts mapped issues across ten thematic areas spanning platform governance, platform design, journalism, science communication, societal dynamics, socio-political institutions, individual behavior, prebunking/literacy, and debunking/fact-checking.
• 47% of experts expect the information environment to worsen over 5–10 years; 43% expect stasis; only 11% expect improvement.
• Current challenges: weak platform regulation, opaque algorithmic curation, clickbait journalism, restricted researcher data access, eroding institutional trust, polarization, and underdeveloped literacy initiatives.
• Anticipated trends: deepfakes, burner accounts, moderation circumvention via subcultural language, “Uberization” of journalism, growing distrust in science, democracy-threatening populism, and a drift toward cynical nihilism.
• Top-rated intervention areas: platform governance (M=3.50) and journalism/news ecosystems (M=3.50); debunking/fact-checking rated lowest (M=3.04).
• Recommended interventions: evidence-based transparent platform regulation, an independent monitoring board, algorithm recalibration, disincentivizing clickbait, strengthened science communication, funded literacy programs, and support for independent fact-checkers.
• Notably, generative AI’s role in misinformation was not anticipated by experts in 2022 — a striking gap given subsequent developments.

Connections

This paper offers a structural counterweight to the individualistic intervention literature on prebunking and inoculation (e.g., van-der-Linden2026-jt, Spampatti2026-kx) by foregrounding platform governance and journalism ecosystems. Its arguments about opaque algorithmic curation and restricted researcher access connect closely to platform-data-access work such as Rieder2026-pp, Helmond2026-ll, Bouchaud2026-lr, and Ohme2026-nv, while its skepticism toward fact-checking-as-cure resonates with critical assessments like Allen2025-ot and Budak2024-ef. The “no silver bullet” framing and concerns about cynical disengagement also align with broader diagnostic work on information disorder by Lewandowsky2026-ob and Starbird2025-jj.

Podcast

A research-radio episode discusses this paper: Listen